TOM Sykes’ 2012 trip to the Nurburgring was a far cry from last year’s unforgettable experience but the Leamington ace insisted there were plenty of positives from a perplexing trip to Germany.

Sykes’ last trip to the iconic German track last season saw him claim his debut World Superbike win in the pouring rain.

Any hopes of a repeat performance this time round were scuppered by bike issues.

The weather gods delivered perfect track conditions but Sykes was left craving last year’s torrential rain as his tyres failed to deal with the heat.

Those machinery issues meant that Sykes was unable to live with the pace of the two race winners Max Biaggi and Chaz Davies – ending in fourth and fifth in the two contests.

But while on paper that seemingly represented a poor day at the office Sykes was rejoicing in his damage limitation – and the struggles of his rivals.

While championship leader Biaggi claimed 25 points in race one he could only finish 13th in race two to bag an overall haul of 28 points compared with third-placed Sykes’ 24.

With the championship’s second-placed rider Marco Melandri unable to finish either race a tricky weekend ended up looking anything but. His rivals’ struggles mean Sykes will head into the last two rounds at Portimao and Magny Cours with a real chance of lifting the World Superbike crown, trailing leader Biaggi by just 26.5 points.

“Things could have been much better,” said Sykes. “Some other riders had a worse day than us so I am quite happy to take good points in each race.

“A difficult day but we pulled points ultimately we cut the championship lead a bit. We will keep working hard for more good finishes.”

Sykes has less than two weeks before he is back on the track at the penultimate round of the season in Portugal and he admitted he’ll need to sort his tyre problems out in double-quick time before making the trip.

“There is a question mark over race one because we used the same kind of tyre that we had used all weekend and we had done race distance on two of those tyres,” he added.

“On each occasion we have been able to do quick laps at the end of the simulated race so it was very strange that that didn’t happen in the race.

“We were running quick times very comfortably at the beginning of the race then we had a massive drop in tyre performance.

“It was a problem that we have never experienced with this bike, let alone this weekend.”

* British Eurosport is the Home of Bikes, showing all MotoGP, World Superbike and British Superbike races on Sky channels 410 and 411 and Virgin Media channels 521 and 525 as well as eurosportplayer.co.uk